Leader

Readers of a delicate nature will have had to suppress a shudder this week in absorbing the implications of our story about the Kedassia supervising authority and its lorry containing both kosher meat and pig carcasses.

There may indeed be no halachic problem because the kosher meat is cleaned and salted after it is delivered.

One of the most dispiriting aspects of the drip, drip, drip of anti-Israel poison into the ether is that it seems endless. Admirable work is done by groups such as BICOM, Just Journalism, the various Friends of Israel and myriad other such organisations. But it often feels like a David and Goliath fight.

Although the second flotilla to Gaza met a farcical end this week, few Israelis were laughing. The activists quickly switched to a plan to swamp Ben-Gurion airport, a sign that their efforts to embarrass and confront Israel are far from over.

It is tempting to think that the Dutch shechitah ban is, as Lord Sacks put it, "a dark day in Dutch history" but of no real concern to us. We are, after all, a very different society from the Netherlands. But that would be a grave mistake. Because the opponents of shechitah have the wind beneath their sails and for them the Dutch ban is simply another victory.

A 20-year-old man held a cigarette lighter against a child's face, made Heil Hitler salutes, and threatened the boy's friends with gas chambers. Yet, because of an agreement made by the Community Security Trust with Greater Manchester Police, the offender was obliged only to issue an apology - and in this case, not even to the victim, but to local CST officials.

There is something wearyingly familiar about the decision of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign to organise a meeting at which one of the speakers is a known antisemite.
This time the man is Raed Salah, leader of the Islamic Movement in Israel. But we have been here so many times before with other speakers.

West Dunbartonshire Council's boycott of Israel is morally wrong and deserves almost everything being thrown at it. But the notion of a tit-for-tat boycott of whisky made by distillers in West Dunbartonshire, such as Chivas, Glenlivet and Ballantine's, is simply ridiculous.
If one is, rightly, angered by blanket boycotts, it is simply perverse to launch another one in competition.

If West Dunbartonshire has been making you queasy, take a glance at San Francisco, the heart of liberal America. Plain old-fashioned antisemitic loathing appears to be out and proud in the campaign against circumcision.

The Jew-hatred behind one of the main campaign tools is breathtaking, with an Aryan hero battling a tallit-donning "Monster Mohel".